CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

I was the last one to arrive at the Moving On meeting. My car wouldn’t start again and I’d had to wait for the bus. When I got there the biscuit tin was just closing, a signal that the real business of the evening was about to begin.

‘Today we’re going to talk about faith in the future,’ Marc said. I muttered my apology and sat down. ‘Oh, and we only have an hour today because of an emergency Scouts meeting. Sorry about that, guys.’

Marc fixed each of us with his Special Empathetic Gaze. He was very keen on his Special Empathetic Gaze. Sometimes he would stare at me for so long I wondered if something was poking out of my nostril. He looked down, as if gathering his thoughts – or perhaps he liked to read his opening lines from a pre-prepared script.

‘When someone we love is snatched from us, it often feels very hard to make plans. Sometimes people feel like they have lost faith in the future, or they become superstitious.’

‘I thought I was going to die,’ said Natasha.

‘You are,’ said William.

‘Not helpful, William,’ said Marc.

‘No – honestly, for the first eighteen months after Olaf died, I thought I had cancer. I think I went to the doctor about a dozen times convinced I was getting cancer. Brain tumours, pancreatic cancer, womb cancer, even little-finger cancer.’

‘There’s no such thing as little-finger cancer,’ said William.

‘Oh, how would you know?’ snapped Natasha. ‘You have a smart answer for everything, William, but sometimes you should just keep your mouth shut, okay? It gets very tedious having you make a snarky comment about everything that someone says in this group. I thought I had little-finger cancer. My GP sent me for tests and it turned out I didn’t. It might have been an irrational fear, yes, but you don’t have to put down everything I say because, whatever you think, you don’t know everything, okay?’

There was a brief silence.

‘Actually,’ said William, ‘I work on an oncology ward.’

‘It still stands,’ she said, after a microsecond. ‘You are insufferable. A deliberate agitator. A pain in the backside.’

‘That’s true,’ said William.

Natasha stared at the floor. Or perhaps we all did. It was hard to tell, given I was studying the floor. She put her face into her hands for a moment, then looked up at him. ‘You’re not really, William. I’m sorry. I think I’m just having one of those days. I didn’t mean to snap at you like that.’

‘Still can’t get little-finger cancer, though,’ said William.

‘So …’ said Marc, as we tried to ignore Natasha cursing repeatedly under her breath ‘… I’m wondering whether any of you have reached a point where you can consider the prospect of life five years on. Where do you see yourself? What do you see yourself doing? Do you feel okay to imagine the future now?’

‘I’ll be happy if my old ticker’s still ticking,’ said Fred.

‘All that internet sex putting it under strain?’ said Sunil.

‘That!’ Fred exclaimed. ‘That was a total waste of money. The first site, I spent two weeks emailing this woman from Lisbon – total cracker – and when I finally suggested we meet up for a bit of the old how’s-your-father, she tried to sell me a condo in Florida. And then a man called Buffed Adonis private-messaged me to warn me off and tell me she was actually a one-legged Puerto Rican fella called Ramirez.’

‘What about the other sites, Fred?’

‘The only woman who said she’d meet me looked like my great-aunt Elsie, who kept her keys in her knickers. I mean, she was very sweet and all, but the old girl was so ancient I was almost tempted to check.’

‘Don’t give up, Fred,’ said Marc. ‘It might be that you’re looking in the wrong places.’

‘For my keys? Oh, no. I hang those by the door.’

Daphne decided she’d like to retire abroad in the next few years – ‘It’s the cold here. Gets into my joints.’

Leanne said she hoped to finish her philosophy master’s. We gave each other the kind of deliberately blank looks you do when nobody wants to admit they had actually assumed she worked in a supermarket. Or maybe a slaughterhouse. William said, ‘Well, you Kant.’

Nobody laughed, and when he realized nobody was going to, he sat back in his chair, and it might have been only me who heard Natasha muttering, ‘Hah hah,’ like Nelson in The Simpsons.

At first, Sunil didn’t want to speak. Then he said he’d thought about it and he’d decided that in five years’ time he’d like to be married. ‘I feel like I’ve turned myself off for the past two years. Like I wouldn’t let anyone get close to me because of what happened. I mean, what’s the point of getting close to someone if you’re only going to lose them? But the other day I started thinking about what I actually want out of life and I realized it was someone to love. Because you got to move on, right? You got to see some kind of future.’

It was the most I had heard Sunil speak in any meeting since I had started coming.

‘That’s very positive, Sunil,’ said Marc. ‘Thank you for sharing.’

I listened to Jake talk about going to college, and how he wanted to train as an animator, and wondered absently where his father would be. Still weeping over his dead wife? Or happily ensconced with some newer version? I suspected the latter. Then I thought about Sam and wondered whether my offhand reference to a relationship had been wise. Then I wondered what we were in if it wasn’t a relationship. Because there were relationships and relationships. And even as I mulled this over I realized that, if he asked, I wasn’t sure which category we even fitted into. I couldn’t help wondering whether the intensity of our search for Lily had acted as a kind of cheap glue, binding us together too quickly. What did we even have in common, other than a fall from a building?